NYT: The Gender Gap

Interesting article about the gender gap in chess from the nNew York Times

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/nyregion/4-young-chess-masters-tackle-a-persistent-puzzle-the-gender-gap.html

One thing I was surprised to learn is that not one player in the 100 best players in the world is a women. This is despite all the efforts to encourage women to play chess and for it being an activity for both genders.

Judit Polgar has been in the top 100 in the past, as high as 8th (according to wikipedia). I believe she stayed in the top-100 for quite a while.

Judit Polgar was still in the top 100 in August 2015 and was listed as inactive after that.

Hou Yifan just dropped off the top 100 this month; she was there last month and has been on the list 23 times (not sure if consecutively without digging more deeply) .

But one thing mentioned in the article, that between a woman and man of the same rating, the woman is pretty good while the man may be average. I have experienced this first hand myself. In my school chess team, even the worst player of the boys team can beat girl #1 ten times over. Still, the girls qualify for the national round every single year while we in the boys team ALWAYS come second place in the regional round. Even in some local chess tournaments here, a girl who gets 7 points out of 9 might qualify for Best Female Player, while Best Male Player requires at least 7.5 to stand a remote chance of a Top 10 position.

This does seem unfair, considering that boys dominate so many more spheres and often have much less chances of winning in their category than girls. I think we need a kind of reverse feminism. Boys should be given prizes in proportion to the number and strength of participants relative to the total not just in chess but in everything else too! Because being No. 1 out of a group which has 5 other decent female players is easier than becoming No. 3 in a group with 25 brilliant male players.

I am having so many conflicting thoughts right now. I understand the requirement of equality, and can go on for another 3 paragraphs about why the viewpoint in the above paragraph is not optimal. But just to engage creative dicussion, I shall leave my comment here as bait for others to continue my discussion and develop something valuable out of this conversation.

Yes, this is why it's so surprising. Women should be going from strength to strength, but this doesn't appear to be the case for some reason.